Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Note on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Cue-titles
- Introduction
- 1 Drama and mimicry in Lawrence
- 2 Mischief or merriment, amazement and amusement – and malice: Women in Love
- 3 Comedy and hysteria in Aaron's Rod
- 4 D. H. Lawrence and his ‘gentle reader’: The furious comedy of Mr Noon
- 5 ‘Homunculus stirs’: Masculinity and the mock-heroic in Birds, Beasts and Flowers
- 6 Comedy and provisionality: Lawrence's address to his audience and material in his Australian novels
- 7 Lawrence's satiric style: Language and voice in St. Mawr
- 8 Humour in the letters of D. H. Lawrence
- 9 Lawrence to Larkin: A changed perspective
- Index
3 - Comedy and hysteria in Aaron's Rod
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Note on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Cue-titles
- Introduction
- 1 Drama and mimicry in Lawrence
- 2 Mischief or merriment, amazement and amusement – and malice: Women in Love
- 3 Comedy and hysteria in Aaron's Rod
- 4 D. H. Lawrence and his ‘gentle reader’: The furious comedy of Mr Noon
- 5 ‘Homunculus stirs’: Masculinity and the mock-heroic in Birds, Beasts and Flowers
- 6 Comedy and provisionality: Lawrence's address to his audience and material in his Australian novels
- 7 Lawrence's satiric style: Language and voice in St. Mawr
- 8 Humour in the letters of D. H. Lawrence
- 9 Lawrence to Larkin: A changed perspective
- Index
Summary
Humor is warm, wit cold,
Wit can be a common scold,
But humor can laugh and do no harm:
For wit is cold and humor warm
(Witter Bynner; ‘O For a Witless Age’)Accusations of humourlessness have always dogged Lawrence, both as a man and writer. Witter Bynner's little poem, inspired by the Lawrence he knew in Mexico, creates the familiar picture of a ‘passionate puritan’, full of high seriousness and low malice, but lacking the humour which bespeaks a sense of proportion towards ourselves and, towards others, the forgiveness of sins. Philip Heseltine agreed with Bynner: ‘no one had a keener sense of the absurdities and weaknesses of others. But of true humour, the humour of God and man as opposed to angel and devil, Lawrence was fundamentally incapable.’ Indeed, Heseltine thought, it is more than likely that ‘Lawrence's incontestable greatness in some respects, both as man and artist, was directly due to his lack of humour.’
Yet Lawrence's letters show a man much interested in comedy, and committed to comedy in his own work, especially in the novels after Women in Love where, with lighter touch, he deliberately set out to reach a wider audience. The Lost Girl ‘does so amuse me’, he wrote (iii. 503); Aaron's Rod ‘is funny. It amuses me terribly’ (iii. 227); whilst Mr Noon too, he thought, was ‘funny, but a hair-raiser’ in which he took ‘much wicked joy’ (iii. 702,646).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Lawrence and Comedy , pp. 70 - 88Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996